News bits: Regarding Dem messaging: How MAGA does tax law; Privacy invasion alert!

A devastating NYT opinion, Democrats Need to Stop Playing Nice, opines & commentates:

Warren Christopher, a courtly former secretary of state, represents the Democratic candidate Al Gore. “The world is watching,” he intones. “We are theoretically its last great democracy. If we cannot resolve this in a way that is worthy of the office we seek, what kind of hope can we give other countries that wish to share our values?” James Baker, another former secretary of state, represents George W. Bush. He has a different theory of the case: “This is a street fight for the presidency of the United States.”

President Biden’s pugilistic State of the Union address last week may represent a new direction. But given the party’s recent history, the Democrats will probably need some CRISPR editing to their DNA.

Both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were distressingly saintly in their presidential campaigns, failing to respond to Republican attack ads. Hillary Clinton endured a classic “Recount” moment in her second debate against Donald Trump. Mr. Trump stalked her around the stage. “He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled,” Mrs. Clinton later wrote. “Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on,” she wondered. “Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me.” Throwing the haymaker might not have won the election, but Mrs. Clinton would have instantly changed the impression that she was a hapless, patronizing, liberal elitist.

Mr. Hur, a Republican, was appointed by the excessively dignified Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate President Biden’s alleged misuse of secret documents. Why a Republican? For the appearance of fairness, no doubt. So Mr. Hur took the opportunity to demolish Mr. Biden as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

I can’t imagine that Republicans would ever hire a Democrat to investigate a president of their own. In fact, Republicans would be more likely to appoint a wartime consigliere, as Mr. Trump did when he brought in William Barr to help defend him against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry.  

It might be educational for the American public to see how the bully responds to a rhetorical punch in the nose rather than to a lawsuit.

I agree with that opinion. Germaine approved.

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A NYT article describes how Bill Barr protected the giant company Caterpillar from paying most of $2 billion in unpaid taxes the company owed:

How Trump’s Justice Dept. Derailed an Investigation of a Major Company

The industrial giant Caterpillar hired William Barr and other lawyers to defuse a federal criminal investigation of alleged tax dodges

In December 2018, a team of federal law enforcement agents flew to Amsterdam to interview a witness in a yearslong criminal investigation into Caterpillar, which had avoided billions of dollars of income taxes by shifting profits to a Swiss subsidiary.

A few hours before the interview was set to begin, the agents were startled to hear that the Justice Department was telling them to cancel the long-planned meeting.

The interview was never rescheduled, and the investigation would limp along for another few years before culminating, in late 2022, with a victory for Caterpillar. The Internal Revenue Service told the giant industrial company to pay less than a quarter of the back taxes the government once claimed that Caterpillar owed and did not impose any penalties. The criminal investigation was closed without charges being filed — and even without agents having the chance to review records seized from the company.

In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Caterpillar’s attorneys met with senior federal officials, including the Justice Department’s top tax official, Richard Zuckerman, according to agency emails. The lawyers sharply criticized the conduct of one of the agents working on the Caterpillar case and questioned the legal basis for the investigation.

A week before the agents were to interview the witness in the Netherlands, President Donald J. Trump nominated Mr. Barr to return to the Justice Department as the next attorney general. Mr. Zuckerman then ordered the interview to be canceled and the inquiry halted, without getting input from the prosecutor overseeing the Caterpillar investigation, according to the emails.  

In September 2022, Caterpillar reached a settlement with the I.R.S., which assessed $490 million in taxes over a 10-year period, plus $250 million in interest. It was a fraction of the more than $2 billion in taxes that the agency previously said Caterpillar owed. (The $490 million included other issues in addition to the Swiss strategy at the heart of the investigation.) The company noted at the time that it “vigorously contested” the I.R.S.’s interpretation of the tax rules at issue.

If DJT gets re-elected, we can expect criminal corporate behavior like to this to skyrocket and donations to the DJT-controlled TTKP to also increase. Free speech in the form of donated piles of special interest cash to the TTKP will be high ROI investments.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

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A NYT article describes car makers sharing driver data with insurance companies:

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies

LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when they sped, braked too hard or accelerated rapidly

Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.

So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.  

“It felt like a betrayal,” Mr. Dahl said. “They’re taking information that I didn’t realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance.”  

General Motors is among the automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans. .... General Motors is not the only automaker sharing driving behavior. Kia, Subaru and Mitsubishi also contribute to the LexisNexis “Telematics Exchange,” a “portal for sharing consumer-approved connected car data with insurers.”

Credit...

That strikes me as a gigantic invasion of privacy. But, when profits at huge corporations are at stake, civil liberties that get in the way are ignored so that they do get in the way much or at all. It is just business. 

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Other bits:

How Big Pharma is fighting Biden’s program to lower seniors’ drug costs -- In court cases nationwide, drug companies are trying to block a new law that would cut prices on drugs for high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. In a flurry of lawsuits, these drugmakers have blasted the government initiative as unconstitutional, defended their pricing practices and warned that regulation could undermine future cures — even as millions of older Americans say they are struggling to afford essential treatments. The legal wrangling appears primed to reach the Supreme Court, which could carry lasting implications for the government’s ability to regulate health-care prices broadly.

PFAS chemicals to be phased out of food packaging. Here’s how to avoid them. -- The FDA said Wednesday that companies are phasing out the use of ‘forever chemicals’ in food packaging. 

The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that companies are voluntarily phasing out the use of “forever chemicals” in food packaging, including fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags and takeout containers that are grease-, oil- and water-resistant. The “major source of dietary exposure to PFAS from food packaging … is being eliminated,” Jim Jones, deputy commissioner for human foods, said in a news release. Consumers can be frustrated because there’s no simple way to test products for PFAS, and the chemicals aren’t included on ingredient lists. 

• Cut back on fast food (and greasy wrappers)
• Skip microwave popcorn
• Avoid nonstick cookware
• Store leftovers in glass containers
• Drink filtered or bottled water
• Check the source of the fish you eat

Jimmy Kimmel responded to DJT criticism live from the Oscars stage Sunday after DJT panned his hosting skills, cracking, “Isn’t it past your jail time?” (🤪 good humor)

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Orange-tufted spiderhunter

Trump mocks Biden’s (since childhood) stuttering affliction…

There you have it, folks: an example of a “not perfect, just forgiven” role model for the Christians (met with laughter).  IDGI. [SMH]

Want to try to explain it to me? Again.

(by PrimalSoup)

Review of Technofeudalism, cloudalists & cloud serfs

The WaPo published a review of the book Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism by Greek economist Yanis Yaroufakis. Yaroufakis argues that for a big portion of modern economies, the tech sector, profits have been significantly replaced by rents. Profit has to be earned. Rents are extracted by virtue of owning a property like Apple or Google app stores. The WaPo review comments (whole article not behind paywall):

Today, some prominent thinkers are telling a different story: Capitalism is dead. It’s a contention that’s explicit in the subtitle of Yanis Varoufakis’s bold new book, “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.” He joins a chorus of observers arguing that the scales have tipped in the direction of a new form of feudalism that strips capitalism of its best features. The former finance minister of Greece (and the negotiator of its debt crisis with the European Union) argues that capitalism has not been overthrown but has instead become something else. .... Blending intellectual memoir, history, and economic and technological history, Varoufakis creates an intimate atmosphere that is a genuine pleasure to read. But its message is grim.

The drumbeat of eulogies for capitalism — such as the media theorist Mckenzie Wark’s “Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?,” an important interlocutor for Varoufakis — all point to the emergence of Big Tech as a breaking point in the story that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. The big tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft — along with Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba are not participants in markets so much as they are markets themselves. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) These platforms only sell goods or host ads as a secondary feature. Their primary function, according to a growing chorus that includes Varoufakis, is to extract rent.

Rent is not profit. The distinction is subtle but crucial: .... Apple has been known to take a cut as large as a third from those selling apps in the App Store, effectively charging rent for being in one of two spaces — the other is Google Play — that all but dominate the mobile market. .... Apple has contributed nothing to the effort of actually producing the program I sell, yet they will receive a significant portion of every dollar that my consumers pay. As thinkers of the Industrial Revolution like Adam Smith and David Ricardo might put it, Apple’s revenue on the platform is merely passive, which is what makes it rent, unlike profit, which has to be actively earned. The problem is that, if the balance shifts away from genuine profit, no growth can occur. Rent is finite: The value that labor puts into commodities is added to the economy and becomes profit. If the economy starts to run on rent, it will stall.

But stagnation, for Varoufakis, would be the least of our problems. He describes the replacement of traditional capital by what he calls “cloud capital,” which no longer focuses on growth, value and profit, but instead on rent extraction and control. The “cloudalists” are the new capitalist bosses, and their influence extends far beyond the workplace to nearly every facet of your app-powered daily life. According to Varoufakis’s narrative, when we are the product — as we are when our clicks and searches generate profit for massive corporations, when our data is bought and sold — we’ve gone over from the relative freedoms of capitalism to technofeudalism, in which those who control the platforms have direct control over the rest of us, reducing us to the station of “cloud serfs.”

In other words, the rise of Big Tech is not just, some have called it, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” It is the end of the agreement that dissolved feudalism, from which grew both capitalism and democracy. Capitalism, as Marx pointed out, freed workers by dissolving the bonds of feudalism. The vassal who labored for a lord was bound to that lord and his land. By contrast, capitalist workers were free to exchange work for money, and “free” to starve if they did not. Contrast this to the positive freedoms of democracy: Varoufakis suggests that our digital world effectively destroys these, and wipes away the beating heart of capitalism with them. Cloud capital [] creates a mirage that looks like capitalism. But what seems like profit, and what seems like work, in the cloud, is really rent, and a new, high-tech form of serfdom.

This problem is worse than ever, and to the extent that it is a crucial part of capitalism, we still very much live under the umbrella of that label. The main virtue of Varoufakis’s book is that it poses the problem of global digitally mediated value. This by itself is illuminating, whether we adopt the term of art “technofeudalism” or not.

News bits 'n chunk: DJT defames Carroll again; A ferocious criticism of the USSC; Charity donations

Meidas Touch News reports that DJT apparently did it again in an incoherent political rally speech:

Donald Trump once again defamed his rape victim, E. Jean Carroll, this time during a rally in Rome, Georgia on Saturday. .... During the dark, rambling and often incoherent speech, Trump complained that “sometimes it’s not good to be rich” before adding:

“I just posted a $91 million bond – 91 million – on a fake story, totally made up story. Think of it – 91 million! I could say things about what it would cost normally. $91 million! Based on false accusations made about me by a woman I know nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of. I know nothing about her. She wrote a book. She said things. And when I denied it, I said, ‘It’s so crazy. It’s false.’ I got sued for defamation.”

Trump then called Carroll “not a believable person” and called Judge Kaplan a “highly corrupt judge.”

That speaks for itself.

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote a 57 page legal analysis criticizing the USSC. The paper, Knights-Errant: The Roberts Court and Erroneous Fact-Finding, argues that not only is the USSC not supposed to do fact finding, which is correct because that is the job of the trial court and discovery. And, when it does its own fact finding, it often gets facts wrong. In essence, Whitehouse argues that the TTKP justices are political hacks who make facts up when the actual facts in the record before the court are inconvenient. Here is how Whitehouse argues his case:

The Supreme Court has broken long-standing rules and practices to force desired results on the American people. One such violation has been its excursion into fact-finding, based not on the record before it, nor on factual findings of Congress, but on imagined or confected findings that served ulterior purposes of the justices. The Court’s persistent refusal to confront these errors in the face of overwhelming evidence only makes the Court’s conduct more egregious. The Court’s new emphasis on “history and tradition” threatens even more wanton and arbitrary fact-finding, and Bremerton foreshadows deliberate disregard by justices of even adjudicatory facts plain in the record before them.

The Supreme Court’s claim to supremacy in constitutional interpretation is at its weakest when the interpretation is premised on bogus facts. Even the power to “say what the law is” enjoys no textual support in the Constitution. Asserting that the Court has ultimate authority to say what the facts are leaps into constitutional fantasy, and endangers the balance between the Supreme Court and its coequal branches. The Court has no special competency to find facts. When fact-finding is done in an unconstrained manner, when the facts arrived at are indefensible, and when they are used to reach a preferred outcome, this signals wrongful trespass into the policymaking function the Constitution assigns to the political branches.  

The American people deserve a Court that plays by the rules. If the Court continues to play fast and loose with the facts to suit the outcome its Republican supermajority wants, Congress has tools to remedy the abuse. Something needs to be done. That something should start in the halls of Congress, and it should start now.

In my opinion, Whitehouse is correct is his analysis and criticisms. But his proposed solution falls flat. Congress is not going to remedy anything. That is out of the question for the foreseeable future. 

Whitehouse singles out a few prominent cases where the USSC went rogue, at great cost to democracy, the rule of law and literally human lives. Those cases include Shelby County (gun safety law), Citizens United (corporations are humans and campaign finance laws invalid), Dobbs (got rid of the right to an abortion), Bruen (gun safety law), and Bremerton (Establishment Clause law decision that blew a big hole in church-state separation, giving expanded access of already tax subsidized churches to tax revenues -- churches can force states to fund their operations).

Our USSC is not only radicalized authoritarian, it is profoundly corrupt. It is morally and intellectually unprincipled to the point of having gone full-blown rogue. Autocratic, Christian and plutocratic dictatorship in America might not even need DJT to do the job. The USSC has to power to do it all by itself and is doing it all by itself.

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A MSNBC opinion comments on how Mike Johnson dealt with the Biden State of the Union address:

Mike Johnson’s eye rolls are a reminder of what Biden is really running against this fall

Republican control of the House of Representatives is a sickness that ought to be excised from the body politic

We can now count “keeping a poker face” among the skills Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is notably lacking, alongside “vote counting” and “swaying his own caucus.” .... Johnson’s eye-rolling and head-shaking turned him into an instant meme across social media, his barely contained discontent providing some comic relief at an otherwise somber moment.

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The NYT reports about self-interested abuse of charity donation law by the cheapskate fascist Elon Musk:

Elon Musk Has a Giant Charity. Its Money Stays Close to Home.

After making billions in tax-deductible donations to his philanthropy, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX gave away far less than required in some years — and what he did give often supported his own interests

Before March 2021, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation had never announced any donations to Cameron County, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Texas that is home to his SpaceX launch site and local officials who help regulate it.

Then, at 8:05 one morning that month, a SpaceX rocket blew up, showering the area with a rain of twisted metal.

The Musk Foundation began giving at 9:27 a.m. local time.

Musk runs a charity with billions of dollars, the kind of resources that could make a global impact. But unlike Bill Gates, who has deployed his fortune in an effort to improve health care across Africa, or Walmart’s Walton family, which has spurred change in the American education system, Mr. Musk’s philanthropy has been haphazard and largely self-serving — making him eligible for enormous tax breaks and helping his businesses.

This is how one money manager (a behemoth called Fidelity Charitable) talks about charitable donations by rich folk:

Income tax strategies — Donations to 501(c)(3) public charities qualify for an itemized deduction from income. Because the tax rate is then applied to a reduced income, this can minimize your overall tax liability. Many donors don’t realize that there are many ways to maximize this seemingly straightforward deduction. For instance, you can “bunch” your charitable contributions in a single tax year, using a donor-advised fund, to increase the amount you donate in a high-income year, and then the funds can be used to support charities over time. Or you can make a combined gift of appreciated assets and cash to maximize your benefits.

Capital gains tax strategies — You can use charitable contributions to reduce your capital gains tax liability by donating long-term appreciated assets. Not only can you deduct the fair market value of what you give from your income taxes, you can also minimize capital gains tax of up to 20 percent.

Estate tax strategies — The federal estate tax is a tax on the transfer of your property at your death. In 2024 the estate and gift tax exemption is $13.61M per individual, so fewer estates will be subject to this tax. By making properly structured gifts and donations, you can remove assets from your estate before the total is tallied and taxed. In fact, you have an unlimited charitable deduction if your estate plan makes gifts to charities.

One has to wonder, what is the net cost-benefit to democracy and society of charitable giving? For rich people, it benefits themselves, especially if they set up their own charity and keep control of the donations like Musk does. This question has been raised before, e.g., like in this 2018 research paper:

Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) are now a major source of charitable do nations in the United States, responsible for 1 in 10 dollars donated to charity in 2015. In 2016, Fidelity Charitable, whose only mission is to provide DAFs, became the largest charity in the United States. Paradoxically, most people have never heard of DAFs or Fidelity Charitable. This leads us to ask, who uses DAFs and why, what is the impact of government tax policy toward DAFs, and could the extra fiscal cost of subsidizing DAFs be balanced out by an extra public gain of new charity resulting from tax policy toward DAFs?

Do DAFs involve enough money for policymakers to really worry about? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes. Figure 1 illustrates recent trends in DAFs. From 2007 to 2015, contributions to DAFs rose by 240% to a total of $22.26 billion per year. Grants from DAFs to charities rose by a similar percent, to $14.5 billion. Year-end assets—the unspent contributions—climbed to $78.64 billion, a 255% increase. Over the same period, the number of DAF accounts grew as well, but at a relatively slower pace of 178% to almost 270,000 accounts.

Q: It is time to get rid of all tax breaks and exemptions for all religions and charities?

The DisPol survey says…

Most of us political junkies here watched the State of the Union address this last Thursday night.  Usually, a sitting president gets a boost in the polls after a SOTU.  For what they’re worth, early flash polling seems to bear that out.   

They’re also saying it was Biden’s biggest fund raising day so far.

Now, granted, it’s long time until election day.  How long?  Long enough to “conceive and birth a baby” long (9-ish months)!  So, we all should be taking my questions with a grain chunk of salt.  Nothing is in cement… yet.  I won’t hold you to your current answers.  There are way too many variables still in the mix (jail time, heart attack and/or stroke time, dead time, … well, you see where I’m going here).

What a build-up! 😁 Now for the questions. 

At this point, and assuming no one suffers any of those dreaded variables I just listed:

1. Who will win the presidency?  Biden or Trump?
2. What will be the popular vote breakdown?
3. What will be the final Electoral College count?

No “I don’t knows” or “could be a tossup” answers please.  We all already know that.  Rather, I want a hard “Biden” or “Trump” on this one.  Bite your lip, close your eyes, think of the flag, and blurt/keypunch it out, as painful as it might be!  Then, if you feel you must, go ahead and bloviate to your little heart’s content.

BTW, I’m not trying to jinx it, for the superstitious among us!  I’m trying to determine where the prevailing wind is blowing.  Be honest, not emotional in your answers.

Thanks!

P.S. I may do this poll again, a week or so before the November election, to see if minds have changed.

(by PrimalSoup)

Rape and 64,000 forced births in two years in states with abortion bans

A research paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States With Total Abortion Bans, asserts some truly shocking data. That paper is behind a paywall, but Scientific American published an article about it. SciAm writes:

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, total abortion bans went into effect in 14 states. Nine of these have no exceptions for rape. Now researchers have attempted to quantify the number of pregnancies that have resulted from rapes in states with a total ban—and the numbers they came up with are staggering.

A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and nearly 59,000 are estimated for states without exceptions. The authors calculate that more than 26,000 rape-caused pregnancies may have taken place in Texas alone.

“Highly stigmatized life events are hard to measure. And many survivors of sexual violence do not want to disclose that they went through this incredibly stigmatizing traumatic life event,” says Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Montana, who led the study. “We will never know the true number of survivors of rape and sexual assault in the U.S.”

The researchers obtained their findings by combining data from multiple sources. Because state-level data weren’t available, the team analyzed national data from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey on intimate partner sexual violence from 2016 to 2017. The researchers also used a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey on criminal victimization. Putting these together, they determined the number of completed vaginal rapes among girls and women of reproductive age—defined as between the ages of 15 and 45 (although some even younger girls and older women are also capable of pregnancy). 

The findings suggest that thousands of people who were raped became pregnant in states where abortion was banned. Even in states with exceptions for rape, very few people got an abortion—likely because of fear and intimidation, Dickman speculates. Some pregnant people in states with bans may have traveled out of state to obtain an abortion legally, but some would have needed to travel hundreds of miles—a journey that is impractical or impossible for many people.

A PBS interview with one of the authors, Dr. Sam Dickman includes these comments:

Interviewer: And you say in your report — or at least I take it you're saying that this could actually be an undercount.

Dickman: Some people will never report that they were sexually assaulted even on an anonymous survey. So that would cause our estimates to be too low. On the other hand, there are other assumptions that we have to make in a modeling study that might bias the estimates to be too high. So we think we use the best available data using published peer-reviewed research. But, of course, these are just estimates.

Interviewer: As we mentioned, there are five states that do have exceptions for rape, but under very tight restrictions. Given those restrictions, how meaningful are those exceptions?

Dickman: Those exceptions provide no meaningful abortion care for survivors of rape and sexual assault, full stop. There are no abortions happening for survivors of rape in states like Idaho that supposedly have exceptions for rape. But we know that, because of the extremely burdensome criteria for obtaining an abortion, not just on the survivor, but on the medical provider, that providers are essentially telling those survivors of rape that they need to travel out of state or find somewhere else to go or continue a pregnancy that was a result of sexual violence.

This is the face of authoritarian Christian nationalist, Christian Sharia law. It is brutal. It is an example of brute force theocratic dictatorship in action. We can expect this to get a heck of a lot worse if DJT gets re-elected.